Optimizing your customer-facing team’s email performance is a competitive advantage.
No one likes waiting days for a reply to their email, and your customers agree.
If you want to ensure your customers are never left waiting for a response, it’s worth considering implementing a standard email response time policy.
This may sound like another boring piece of documentation, but in reality any company that can respond to customer emails quicker than competitors has an advantage.
In this blog, we’ll cover the main reasons for implementing a standard email response time policy to boost the performance of your customer-facing teams.
The average email response time for sales leads is 42 hours. Sound slow? It is!
In truth, many variables may affect email response time, such as whether the email relates to work or a customer query. Even the age of the responder can make a difference.
For example, one study found that teens were the quickest to reply, with an average email response time of 13 minutes, while those over 51 took an average of 47 minutes to respond.
Within customer-facing teams, the average response time to handle a customer service request was 12 hours, based on a study of more than 1000 companies.
And yet, our culture of instant gratification means many customers quickly become frustrated by slow replies. This may even cause them to switch to a competitor that is more responsive.
Reducing the average response time should be a top priority for every customer-facing team.
A positive customer experience is one of the most critical factors in a company’s success. Customer experience is considered to be the crucial deciding factor when it comes to customers choosing between competitors.
That is what makes the next stat so surprising. In a study of more than 1000 companies, nearly 60% of companies did not respond to a customer service request.
Customers feel they aren’t all that important to you when customer service requests go unanswered. That’s no way to build long-term loyalty and a happy customer base. Any business that consistently ignores its customers is unlikely to survive in this competitive market.
When customers receive quick and satisfactory responses to their requests, you build goodwill that can improve your retention and drive higher levels of customer loyalty.
Fast email response times are essential for those who want to offer a top-quality customer experience for their customers.
🔵 Customer service email response time tip:
Up your customer response game by using purpose-designed software. Look for an automation tool that allows you to set custom response time thresholds. Ensure your team receives an alert when an email is approaching that threshold. This way, you will never miss an email or leave it too long.
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Did you know the average office worker receives 121 emails every single day?
That’s a lot of communication to keep track of. Email volume is expected to grow due to the rising popularity of remote and hybrid work.
While some teams will use messaging platforms like Slack for internal collaboration, many still choose email as their primary communication channel.
With so many emails to keep track of, it can be hard to ensure you respond within timeously.
🔵 Business email response time tip:
Develop a standard email response time policy to formalize email response time expectations. Put tools in place to track and measure average response times. This provides helpful insights into team performance and areas for improvement.
Many customer-facing teams face challenges that hinder quick email responses, including:
1️⃣ No formal policy to guide email response times
Many companies don’t have guidelines in place to communicate what the preferred response time is. When there are no clear guidelines, team members respond when they can. This approach often means response times are slow and inconsistent.
2️⃣ Lack of visibility over key email metrics
Most major email platforms do not track essential email metrics such as response times, making it impossible to see where improvements are needed. By using email performance optimization tools like timetoreply Optimizer, companies can track and measure average response times as well as team members’ performance, along with a broad range of key email metrics.
3️⃣ Not understanding which emails are urgent
When companies receive high email volumes, it is essential to understand which emails should get attention first. High-value emails require immediate attention, whilst low-value emails can be put into the queue. If teams spend too much time on low-value email tasks, unnecessary bottlenecks occur.
A professional email response time policy is a company’s formal commitment to quickly and efficiently respond to customer and prospect emails.
With an email response time policy in place, your customer-facing teams will have clear guidance over the time allowed between incoming queries and their responses.
This helps maintain high levels of customer service and helps provide a positive customer experience.
How we communicate – in business and life – has changed markedly over the past few years. Remember a time before smartphones and social media? Staying in touch with people was a lot harder back then.
Today, companies use various communication tools and platforms to keep in touch with teams and deliver high levels of support to customers.
However, email is still hugely important. In fact, most customers prefer email over any other channel.
The ability to respond quickly to customer questions directly contributes to business success. That’s why leading companies have formal policies guiding their teams over how quickly they need to respond to emails.
👇Find out what the professional standard is for different industries in the report below
Companies can unlock amazing benefits by boosting email reply time.
Benefit #1 – Boost customer loyalty
Excellent customer service is the foundation of good customer retention strategies. When customers receive high levels of care, they are 62% more likely to purchase from you again.
Benefit #2 – Improve your customer experience
A quick email reply time is essential to providing a positive customer experience. Helping customers find information quickly or resolve issues contributes to a smooth, positive customer experience and helps to boost customer loyalty and retention.
You can measure your average response time by tracking the time it takes for a customer to receive a response to their email.
Email performance optimization tools like timetoreply empowers teams, delights customers, and boosts revenue. By providing real-time insights into various email-related metrics, timetoreply helps companies to not only track their customer-facing teams’ performance, but to transform it.
A standard email response time policy is a fantastic way to improve your customer service and deliver a consistent, memorable customer experience.
Teams that track and measure their email performance against a formal email response time policy can make improvements that raise the bar on customer service.
Schedule a demo now and discover the future of elevated communication strategies!
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